


two young savage things

by CloudDreamer



Series: through the looking glass [1]
Category: Blaseball (Video Game)
Genre: Cults, Dark Seattle Corporates (Blaseball Team), Dystopia, Extreme Derealization, Heavensmaw Moonrays (Blaseball Team), Identity Horror, Implied/Referenced Abuse, Loss of Identity, Referenced/Implied Police Brutality, Shared Consciousness, Synergy Blood, hivemind - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-04
Updated: 2021-02-04
Packaged: 2021-03-16 04:53:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,368
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29201649
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CloudDreamer/pseuds/CloudDreamer
Summary: A cracked mirror and a broken radio are alone in a dark room. Something is made of it.(or, Iggy of the Moonrays is switched onto the Corporates in exchange for Theodore Duende, and he finds his way to the long abandoned Lenny)Recommended Listening: Damn These Vampires by the Mountain Goats
Relationships: Lenny Marijuana & Igneus Delacruz
Series: through the looking glass [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2144031
Comments: 2
Kudos: 6





	two young savage things

**Author's Note:**

> This is from the Mirrorverse AU where Seattle is a dystopian corporate owned nightmare and Heavensmaw -- instead of Hellmouth -- is a cult created by Sandoval and his now dead husbands. The Dark Seattle Corporates, the mirror of the Garages, are a hivemind. This has no bearing on the main universe and shouldn't be considered remotely "canon."

The thin light flickers hazily from the computer screen behind them, passing through each possible variation of screensaver until the cycle repeats. All different pictures of Seattle, from angles that shouldn’t be possible, or, at the very least, from angles that most people wouldn’t be comfortable knowing that there’s pictures of. The password field is open, waiting for someone to come use it, but nobody will. The door to this room isn’t locked, and everything here is perfectly functional, up to date with all the latest planned obsolescence. The two hunched over figures in the little nook between the side of the desk and the wall take care of that, even if they’re never going to use it. 

Every week, the door is opened slightly and a box is shoved in ever so quickly with whatever food the rest of the Corporates could be bothered to scrounge up. The packaging is sleek, precise, and a nightmare for anyone else to open, but when they retrieve the empty box at the end of the week for disposal and to replace it with a new one, everything that remains is always neatly put back, with barely any signs of the standard struggle. The napkins might be slightly singed, but they’re never used. 

If it was anyone else, the Corporates might gossip about it, sending pulses of curiosity back and forth to each other, escalating their fascination with the mystery only for it to hit a fever pitch and then lose all interest for a couple of days until it starts all over again. But when it comes to Lenny Marijuana and Igneus Delacruz, they leave well enough alone. If the thought of them in any form, even just as an acknowledgment of their presence in the loop, is brought into the collective conscious, it is pushed away with often violent force. 

There’s no discussion. No memory of what Lenny could’ve been. No resentment towards what Igneus used to stand for. One attempt to push the thoughts on them from the outside ended with seven corpses, neither of which were of Corporates. The higher ups quietly accept the disappearance of their players. They made these wolves, but sometimes it seems like the executives are the ones on the leash. 

The Moonrays taunt them on it sometimes, when the games last long into the night and talk gets vicious, but they have plenty of barbs to throw back. Plenty of ways to dig beneath their too perfect skin, especially when the one pushing is an ever increasingly scarred Theodore. Traitor, they crow in unison, and they say he will never belong to his new team. They say it, and he falters, and Sandoval gives him _that_ look. That’s when they know he’ll have more scars the next time they play. That’s how they know they’ve won. They holler and hoot, and Theodore keeps breaking. 

Betrayal does not require control, here. Betrayal is a feeling. It is a loss, the cutting away of a limb from the body that is their loop, and now he is free of it, the rest see what his presence was masking. They see he was cruel, see his arrogance and how it was slowly poisoning them. They do not see their own and each others, not while the blue runs through them. Not while they are a single unit. Perhaps it was a good riddance he was ripped away from them, they justify, just as they implicitly accept one of their most hated enemies. 

At least, the Igneus of the Moonrays had been a hated enemy. They’d despised him with everything they had, rage that rose without control. But now he’s nothing, and their refusal to acknowledge him is the closest that he will ever come to love. He is here, with Lenny, and even if neither of them are really people, they’re less empty when they’re near each other. This is the heart of the loop, and it is hollow. 

Lenny’s body shakes, the sound of control vibrating through their body. It is something ugly to hear. It is oppression distilled, and it is sharp. It is the sound of a boot digging into someone’s back, the sound of tear gas releasing, and the music you hear in an elevator that goes on without end. It is repetitive, and if its noise didn’t drive anyone who heard such a pure version to their knees, it would make them want to cover their ears and scream to mask the sound. Once it’s gotten its hooks into its victims, it’ll always be ringing somewhere in them. 

It is imperfect, though, especially on such a powerful pack of monsters. Defiance could circle through them. Just a single note of revolution could lead them to wildness. Lenny is the solution. They are here to drown out anything that might not fit the party line before it builds up, and even then, even with the sound of control raging like a wildfire, they threaten to turn ugly. 

They have been here since the Last Gig. Since someone -- who was it, again? — turned Seattle’s last hope into its worst nightmare. Lenny had played till their hands were bloodied. They had sung till their voice was no more, and then they screamed without it. They were the last one standing when everyone else had been dragged away, still screaming with nothing coming out as they were driven to their knees. Before Igneus, their thoughts were distant, more a dream than a train of consciousness. Everything was that moment, played from every possible angle, the terror on their friends’ faces as the barriers fell one by one. They would feel each hit land, the sound that bleeds through them now the only thing they could hear above the screams, the closest thing to coherency the certainty that they were going to be lined up against the wall and shot. 

Then Igneus came, the light that everyone on both the Moonrays and the Corporates could’ve sworn would last forever extinguished. The others didn’t know what to think. Igneus Delacruz, one of Heavensmaw’s weapons, was violence under a crooked mask to them. He was the smile as the flames went higher, white hot light so out of place beneath the dead sun, taking out his own inadequacies on the world around him, and. 

But at the end of the season, Teddy was gone, cut out and replaced with the limp doll that leans into Lenny now. He is tied to their loop now, capable of standing, but his stance is only that of what he sees. He is a mirror. The Corporates tried with him some, more than they tried with Lenny. He played, but — it wasn’t enough. It wasn’t ever going to be enough. 

They don’t know how he found Lenny. It’s one of those questions they don’t ask. 

Igneus is empty and Lenny is overwritten, but together, somehow, they’re more than the combination of their broken pieces. It’s not much. They sit most days, with their heads on each other’s shoulders, but whatever lock kept Lenny’s distant dream on the last moment of terror is broken now. Igneus reflects the moments beyond pain, and Lenny loops it back. There is something soft behind the oppressive sounds. 

They are still broken. This is not whole. This is not love. But it is an awkward first kiss and two kids laughing, wondering why they’d taken themselves so seriously in the first place. Even with this, Lenny can’t bring back her name or her face, but they know the warmth in their chest from when they held her hand, when they asked shyly if she wanted to try again, and again. 

It is being tucked into bed with a bedtime story with warm milk and a cookie. 

“Hush,” Lenny whispers. 

“Hush,” Igneus repeats, and he takes the next words, “Sleepy time now, Lenny.” 

Lenny takes Igneus’s hair and brushes it gently. Igneus reaches up to where Lenny’s hands are, tries to take the same space. The hands push each other away, overlap, pull each other in. The words are short and simple, when they come at all. Most days, it’s just noises, barely representing anything but security.


End file.
